Elizabethtown (Special Collector's Edition)

Share.

Does Crowe's paean to his pop prove more evocative on the small screen?

By Todd Gilchrist

"Someone once said that there's a difference between a failure and a fiasco."

These are the first words spoken in Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, and they set an inauspicious tone for what follows, even set against the director's unassailable canon of coming-of-age stories. The film, which follows a young shoe designer as he simultaneously contends with the death of his father and the demise of his first major creation, purports to be about any number of subjects - love and life, success and failure, 'the journey' and 'the destination'. But unlike the director's greatest cinematic achievements - Say Anything, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous - its overall effect is marred by a distinct lack of focus that earns it credit as an ambitious if not wholly successful effort.

Orlando Bloom, late of a spate of period epics from Lord of the Rings to Kingdom of Heaven, plays Drew Baylor, a young designer whose eight-year project - a winged tennis shoe unfortunately dubbed the Spasmotica - recently landed in stores to the kind of criticism, much less commercial failure, reserved only for two kinds of ideas: those rightly abandoned in development because of their preposterousness, and those mass-marketed as the 'second coming' of a commercial property - again, because of their preposterousness. The Spasmotica falls into the latter category - it lost his company close to a billion dollars - so Drew makes perhaps the only honorable decision: throw himself on the altar of artistic integrity, take one for the team, and then quietly slink off to kill himself with a makeshift exercise bike/ suicide machine.

Before he puts his plan into fatal action, however, his sister Heather (Judy Greer) calls with equally upsetting news - namely, that his father Mitch (Tim Devitt) passed away, and he has to 'take care of' the arrangements in lieu of herself and their mother Hollie (Susan Sarandon), who has thrown herself orgiastically into action in order to avoid confronting her grief. Because Mitch passed away in Elizabethtown, KY, far from their home in Seattle, Drew must journey to his father's hometown to retrieve the body, or perhaps, just the ashes; but on the plane, he meets Claire (Kirsten Dunst), a plucky flight attendant, who offers him directions (and some sage wisdom) before sending him off to deal with his unfortunate family business. Before long, Drew finds himself contemplating not only his father's legacy, but his own mortality, and just maybe, the possibility that the worst circumstances might have brought him right into the bosom of the person who could save his life.

Notwithstanding the film's not-so-subtle homage to the kind of idealism that ousted Jerry Maguire from his sports agent roost ("we've taken magic and put it in a shoe!" celebrates Drew), Cameron Crowe's latest film is not unlike its predecessors in its avoidance of anything resembling a bow-tied resolution, and its underlying themes of enjoying the journey rather than racing towards the destination; Jerry, Lloyd Dobler, and now Drew Baylor all seek a certain kind of finality - a career, a lifestyle, a degree of success - that eludes them the harder they pursue it. Drew is constantly on the move - flying, driving, walking, running - but never seems to get anywhere; Claire, meanwhile, is always going from one place to the next, but always seems utterly present, no matter what her location. This combination makes for fertile dramatic (much less comedic) territory, but ultimately it's not planted in soil deep enough to grow real emotional roots.

The film has thus far endured at least two different versions: the theatrical cut, which opens October 14, 2005, and the 'Toronto cut,' which ran 18 minutes longer. While I gratefully received Crowe's longer cut of Almost Famous (and quite frankly, would have asked for more) when it was released on DVD, Elizabethtown doesn't have its predecessor's clarity of vision, nor its emotional center; from the opening scenes, Orlando Bloom can scarcely fill a suit, much less the screen, and offers no insights as to what poor Drew is actually thinking amidst the maelstrom of activity that swirls around him.

And while Kirsten Dunst plays a character of such improbable awesomeness that she will no doubt be catapulted to stratospheric new heights of obsession and fanboy festishism (imagine - a girl who's pretty, smart, down-to-earth, insightful, sensitive, comforting and knows pretty much everything about music), Claire doesn't have the imminently more compelling (or human) inner conflict that made Kate Hudson's Penny Lane an irresistible smolderer in a sixteen year-old's body.

That said, Crowe knows better than perhaps anyone working in movies today how to depict the kismet of the modern courting ritual; in two major set pieces - an all-night phone conversation between Drew and Claire, and brilliantly, a road trip hosted by Drew alone - Crowe not only pinpoints but perfects a seemingly indefatigable series of moments where the two characters fall in love, over and over again, without needing to acknowledge their mutual discovery with words.